Selfish
by True Colours
Summary: On the Tribute Train, Thresh lets himself imagine what it would be like if he could protect his tiny fellow-tribute. Of course, there's no possibility that he'll be able to in real life, because there's only ever one victor...


**Selfish**

******Disclaimer: **I don't own any characters from The Hunger Games.

He hadn't expected his fellow-tribute to be so tiny.

Of course he knew that it made no difference, since twenty-three of the tributes always ended up dead no matter how strong they were, and a little wisp like that with five sisters wasn't likely to survive long in District 11 anyway, but somehow knowing these facts objectively wasn't quite the same as watching one small girl in particular walk out of the crowd to fight to the death.

Thresh lowers the towel he's drying his face and hair with and stares into the full-length mirror of the train's shower room. He has to bend his knees slightly to get the top of his head into the reflection. He meets his own eyes, then looks down at the reflections of his arms and hands. There's no competition between himself and that little girl. He could lift her off her feet one-handed.

There's a sliver of a line of sight between the shower room and the suite that has been given to her, and round her bedroom door he can see two stiff curls and one bright brown eye, watching him. She's staring silently at the arm that's facing towards the door. As Thresh steps out into the hallway she melts back into her bedroom, hiding. It's as though she thinks they're already fighting, and she isn't the only one. Their district escort looked a little taken aback when Thresh climbed onto the stage, and even the Peacekeepers on the train, though they try to seem perfectly in control, give him the centre of the corridor when they pass. In a way he hates how he's already being thought of as a killer, but even though he hates it his body plays up to it, sweeping him around the train as though he owns the place. And why should he care? If he looks dangerous, he will get sponsors, and sponsors are good.

When he comes into the salon carriage in the middle of the afternoon, a tiny gasp alerts him to Rue's presence before he sees her, with her back to him and her head not even protruding over the top of the sofa. He walks round the mahogany table, which seems to be permanently loaded with cakes and sweetmeats even between meals, and sits down opposite her. It's clear from the way she shrinks back slightly that she wants to get up and dart away, but she seems to have decided to stop hiding from him. She sits up very straight, gestures to the table and says,

'Would you like something to eat?'

She must have been a picker in one of the orchards, he thinks. He's seen kids exactly like her in his own section. They can climb along slim branches to reach the highest fruit, and they weigh a little less than the apple sacks the men on his team sling over their shoulders and carry to the carts.

Where the hell's the fun in picking a girl like that? Thresh knows all about the thrill of watching a fight. How often has he stood in a circle, watching a couple of bored, angry men get ready to pound each other's brains out? Analysing each one, trying to guess which one will turn out to have the edge. But there's no question of who'll have the edge over Rue. You might as well place bets on a cat against a rabbit.

'I know they're not mine,' Rue says defensively, and Thresh remembers that he was meant to be answering a question, 'but Lucienne Lux said it's good manners to offer.'

'No thanks,' Thresh says in an ungrateful tone, scowling at the thought of their escort. 'I've got mine here.'

He gets out a burlap sack and begins to take out what he's got inside. Several good oranges and nectarines, which he's tasted maybe once in his life before. A big loaf of fine, crusty white bread. A wheel of cheese as big round as his head.

Rue watches the food stack up with very big eyes.

'That all yours?' she asks quietly.

'No,' Thresh says. 'I stole it. Not much they can do about it now, is there, and it serves the bastards right.' He breaks the cheese, which is the crumbly kind and scatters bits on the carpet, and takes a bite out of the chunk he's snapped off. 'Besides, Capitol food turns my stomach.'

There's a long pause, during which Thresh chews and Rue stares at her hands. Then finally she says,

'Mine too.'

Thresh snorts. Rue looks shocked and a bit upset, so he lets the snort spread into a plain, open grin. 'Here, you want some?' he asks, gesturing with the bread and cheese.

'Yes please,' Rue whispers. Thresh rips off a hunk of bread and tosses it into her lap. She picks it up and starts to nibble. Her curls almost hide her face.

The torn bread fills the carriage with a fresh, yeasty smell. Thresh sandwiches lumps of bread and cheese together and stuffs them into his mouth.

'Tastes like home, doesn't it?' he says. Rue doesn't answer for a moment. Then she gives a sniff, and Thresh sits up straighter and sees that tears are dripping onto the piece of bread in her hand.

It isn't any particular weakness of his that makes him drop his food and dart round the table to her, since the response to a cherubic face with tears running down it is hardwired by evolution into the human brain.

'Lucienne said,' Rue sobs, bringing her hands up to her face, 'that if I had good manners I could make people like me and I'd get sp – sp – spon –'

'What?' Thresh says brusquely, crouching down beside her chair, but she squeals and pulls herself away from him, crying louder and putting her arms up to protect her face.

Thresh didn't have any particular plan when he ran round the table, and he has no experience of comforting people, so for the next five minutes he just kneels there with his hands held palm-up in front of him, mumbling vaguely about how he's not going to hurt her. Eventually she stops trying to push him away and falls into his arms instead, and somehow he ends up holding her on his lap while she cries into his chest.

'Shh,' he says, patting her head awkwardly. 'It's alright…'

'I don't want to die,' Rue sobs. '_I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die!'_

'Shh, I know…'

He realises she's getting hysterical. Her inward breaths sound rough and heaving, and her crying is almost like keening. Her muscles feel surprisingly strong now they're jerking with sobbing.

'I don't want to die!'

'I don't want you to die either,' he says, to himself, really. 'I don't want to die.' But it's the Hunger Games. Twenty-three out of twenty-four of them are going to die, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. He rubs circles on her back that he hopes are soothing and tries not to think about it very hard.

At last she starts to quieten down, and he decides to try talking to her.

'I know it's scary,' he says, 'but try not to think about that part. Plan your strategy instead. What can you do?'

She starts to shake again at that question, which isn't surprising. He's just reminded her of how helpless she is. He scrambles for something else to say.

'You look like you were a picker in the orchards, weren't you?' he says, as gently as he can. 'Are you good at climbing trees?'

There's a pause. Then Rue says in a tiny voice,

'Yes…'

'Some of the kids in my orchard could jump from tree to tree as well,' Thresh presses. Rue sniffs.

'I can do that…'

'There, so you can hide and pick food, if the arena has trees,' he says encouragingly. 'That's something. And I bet you know how to spot tracker-jacker nests and weak branches and things, too, and which fruits are edible…'

'Yeah,' Rue says, sitting up and rubbing her eyes a little. 'And I can use a slingshot too. I can hit birds with it. Groslings. And cook them.'

'You can make fire?'

'Yes. You have to look for light pieces of wood. That means they're dry; they burn better and they don't make so much smoke…'

'There,' Thresh repeats. 'You see? I didn't know that.'

Rue clamps her hands over her mouth, looking stricken.

'Hey, hey, look, it's okay,' Thresh says. 'A trick for a trick, it's only fair.' He tugs his shirt round to show her a dried ear of grain stuck into one of the buttonholes. 'This is my district token, you see? We don't cultivate this kind of grain, so, y'know, not many people know it's good, but you can eat it. The seeds are more watery than most cereals, so they'll keep you more hydrated too. It's not bad raw, in a pinch. And it grows well in the wild.'

'What's it called?' Rue asks, fingering the dry, feathery ear.

'Milk-oat,' Thresh says. 'Or thresher's oat. Because the kernels come out so easily, threshing it's hardly any work.'

'Okay,' Rue says. 'I'll remember Thresh's oat when I'm hungry, and you remember about the wood.'

'It's a deal,' Thresh says, using the corner of his shirt to dab the tears from her eyes. Later, he allows himself a daydream where, when the gong sounds, he scoops up the little girl and runs with her away from the Cornucopia. He manages to defend her and keep her safe, from Career tributes and wild animals and hunger and thirst, and in the end he makes sure, spitting in the face of the Capitol's blood sport, that the youngest and most innocent tribute is the one who gets to go home.

Of course, in real life it doesn't work out quite like that. Survival instinct wins out. There's nothing he can really do for her; she's probably better off hiding alone than with him making her a target for every Career and her slowing him down. Besides, he wants to live too. Can anybody really blame him for thinking like that?

Except it seems that the girl from District 12, the Girl on Fire, doesn't think like that. While Thresh was hiding and making plans, she formed an alliance with Rue and cared enough about her that Clove thought her death was a worthwhile taunt. She cared for Rue even though there was nothing she could do for her either. And as it turns out, there would have been something Thresh could have done for her, because, due to the rule change the pair from 12 have brought about by caring for one another, two tributes from the same district can now be crowned victors, jointly. If Thresh hadn't been so damned selfish, he could have had a district partner now. He could lift Rue off her feet with one hand; she wouldn't have slowed him down much. He could have kept her safe; safer than the 12 girl with her flashy arrows did. But he didn't, and now it feels like the world is mocking him with that too-late rule-change. He could have taken that little girl home to her family after all, if he hadn't been so damned selfish.

Is it any wonder, then, that he feels he has to make some small gesture of atonement to the Girl on Fire?

**A/N: Thresh is a very ambiguous character in canon. He's not a psychopath like Cato or Clove, but he does seem very pragmatic, ruthless and bent on survival, so I've always wondered what his relationship was to Rue, that made him make that one big, pointlessly noble gesture of sparing Katniss's life. I came to the conclusion that, though he probably stayed aloof from Rue most of the time in order not to get attached, he must have shared a couple of moments with her in order for her to make an impression on him. That bit in the film where he tuts at her stealing the knife is a good example of her impressing him, and I think that an accidental moment of closeness in the heat of the moment following the reaping might be another.**

**Speaking of Rue and her knife-nicking and stuff (which I thought was very in keeping even though it wasn't in the book), I recognise that she came across as a bit of a drip in this fic. I decided that she would have one moment of blind panic after getting picked, which Thresh calmed her down from, and that after that she managed to stay steely-calm. **

**Also, I never considered how the teams-rule – when it's too late – might have made Thresh feel guilty and contribute to his sparing Katniss, until I started this oneshot. Writing can be its on inspiration. Aaaand…**

***Carves new notch in laptop to signify new fandom***

**True**


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